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After a longer pause, her boss said, “I can understand that. But be discreet, Bree. Tread lightly. People with that kind of money can be terribly dangerous if provoked.”
Elena hung up. Through a hedge of rhododendrons, Bree spotted the roof of a greenhouse and decided she had to take the chance.
On the plane, she’d read an article inArchitectural Digestabout Theresa May Alcott’s renovation of her Hunting Valley home and a piece inBetter Homes and Gardensfeaturing her Wyoming ranch house. According to the second article, Alcott was a die-hard horsewoman out west. According to the first article, she spent an equal amount of time tending her gardens back east.
“Gardening in Jackson is like doing combat with the elements,” Mrs. Alcott was quoted as saying. “And you nearly always lose. If I want to see something grow out of the ground under my care, I retreat to my gardens in the humidity of Ohio.”
Hunting Valley was one of the six wealthiest towns in the United States, a quiet, wooded village that billionaires and society matrons called home. Bree knew that leaving a rental car behind the property of one of the richest women in America was bound to attract attention.
Have to accept it,she thought, and pulled off the road by a thick grove of pine trees. She put on a tiny but sensitive Bluetooth microphone disguised as a small ebony carving hanging from athin gold chain around her neck and connected it to her cell phone and a voice-activated recording app.
Bree tested the connection, then got out, crossed the street, and pushed through the rhododendrons. She emerged onto a wide lawn that felt like plush carpet beneath her feet and crossed to a wooden archway that led to a high-fenced garden that covered more than an acre.
Moving beneath the archway, she noticed the posts of it were wrapped in greening clematis vines, a few tentacles budding already. The walkway of crushed gray slate through the garden was bordered by five rows of raised beds on either side.
The rich soil in the far beds looked recently turned over and ready to be planted. In the near boxes, the annual flowers were already thriving. In another one, tulips and daffodils bloomed in full riot.
But Bree saw no sign of Theresa May Alcott anywhere in the garden. She caught movement in the greenhouse and walked to the door. Inside, a woman in her late sixties worked at a potting bench. She was tall, feline, with long pewter-colored hair in a braid, a classic beauty that put Bree in mind of the country star Emmylou Harris.
A big Polynesian guy was working beside her. He saw Bree, came up with a pistol, and walked toward her fast. “Who are you? What are you doing here? You do not have permission to be here.”
Bree held up her hands but before she could identify herself and apologize for the intrusion, Theresa May Alcott said, “It’s all right, Arthur.” She gazed at him and then Bree. “You have exceeded my expectations, Chief Stone,” Alcott said. “I predicted a phone call or a knock at my front door, not a barging into mygreenhouse.” The billionaire laughed. “But then I guess you are a barging-in kind of person, aren’t you?”
Bree wanted not to like her, for some reason. But Alcott’s smile and laugh were genuine and contagious.
“I guess I am,” Bree said. “All elbows and knees.”
CHAPTER 64
IT TOOK THOMAS TULLan hour working with an FBI computer technician in a van outside the Kane crime scene, but using his cell phone and car GPS data, the writer began to convince us of where he’d gone after we’d lost him at the north end of Rock Creek Parkway the evening before.
Tull’s data showed him bailing left off Cathedral Avenue and taking a quick right with his headlights off, which explained how he’d lost me and Sampson. From there, he’d zigzagged northwest through Chevy Chase back to Bethesda and close to Potomac, but he’d never come within six miles of the Kane home.
According to the data, at nine p.m., Tull was parking at an upscale Chinese restaurant in Bethesda. He used a phone app to pay for dinner a few minutes later.
“That was a quick eat,” I said.
“Takeout,” the writer said.
“But you didn’t get back in the car for almost an hour,” Sampson said. “What did you do? Go for a walk? Eat outside? Meet someone?”
Tull reacted awkwardly, then nodded. “I met someone. We ate outside.”
“Who was that?”
After another awkward moment, he said, “Suzanne Liu. My former editor.”
“Who you threatened with violence,” I said.
“Who I promised financial repercussions if she continued to spread lies about me.”
The writer said that the editor had messaged him earlier in the day, apologizing for her behavior and inviting him to meet her before she returned to New York.
“She said she wasn’t angry anymore, but she had things to say to find closure,” Tull said. “She told me she was going to change professions and work as a literary agent. She said she’d managed to find perspective and move on in the past few days, but deep down she loved me, and that had clouded her reactions to losing me as a writer and then losing her job.”
Sampson said, “She’ll back you up on all that?”
“Maybe not all of it. Women can be touchy about love. But the gist of it, I’m sure.”
